Untested: Homecoming

This is the start of a new series of posts for ideas I want to put out that are untested by me for one reason or another. Usually because I haven’t been in the position to perform the trick or because it’s an idea I have for a venue or setting in which I don’t perform.

Homecoming

Why It’s Untested: I actually like this idea quite a bit and I’ve been sitting on it since a reader, JP, sent me an email with the basic concept in March of 2020.

It sort of requires a specific situation for you to be able to perform it, and I haven’t really encountered that situation in the past year. But as the world progresses more towards normality over the next few months, you may come across an opportunity to perform this, and I think it would be a big hit.

I will describe a somewhat “idealized” version of a situation in which you might use it, but you’ll easily see how you could vary the presentation to be used in a different scenario.

This is sort of a strange trick because I think the best use for it would be over video chat with someone who is in the same house as you. It’s not necessary to do it that way, but that’s how I’ll describe it, because that’s how I’ve been imagining it.

What it looks like: You tell your spouse, “Hey, so the people at work are bugging me to do a magic trick for the corporate office over video conference tomorrow. I have something in mind, but I need to test it out. Would you mind sitting through it and giving me your thoughts?”

You go to a different room of the house and fire up a zoom conference with your wife in the living room.

She can see you sitting a your desk and in the background, on the wall, is large manilla envelope with a question mark on it.

“Okay,” you say, “so the idea is you’re going to choose a random number to select something from this numbered list on my phone. When I do it tomorrow, they’ll be randomly choosing one of the light bulbs in our line of high-quality, long-lasting light bulbs. But the trick sort of works better if it’s something you care about. So instead I’m going to have you randomly select a member of your extended family. Give me a number between 1 and 42.”

Your wife says 20 and you open up a list you made on your phone of members of her extended family. You scroll down to the person at #20 and it’s her cousin Greg.

“Okay, perfect, cousin Greg. That was a free choice, yes? If you had chosen #19, you would have had Aunt Virginia. If you had chosen #21 you would have had Grandpa Bill. Now check this out.”

You get up out of your seat and walk to the back wall and remove the large envelope with the question mark on it. You walk back towards the desk and sit back in the chair, open the envelope and—holding it up to the camera—you slide out an 8x11 picture of cousin Greg’s bit fat head.

Your wife reacts and after a beat or two you pull the picture aside and reveal that you are now cousin Greg. That’s right, you’re transformed into the randomly selected family member. Cousin Greg can now go downstairs and reunite with your wife who he hasn’t seen in over a year.

Method: This is based on those classic stage illusions where the magician is wearing a mask for whatever weird reason. Then at some point he walks behind something and switches with someone in a matching mask. That person now acts as the magician for a little while as the real magician runs backstage and around the theater and up to the balcony so that when the faux-magician on stage vanishes, the real one can jump around on the balcony, “Here I am! It’s me! Mr. Magician!”

Here’s Copperfield doing it with a motorcycle helmet instead of a mask. But you get the idea.

The beauty of doing this over video chat is you can do it without a mask. You just need a brief moment out of frame to switch the two people, and then to block the person’s head with something until the change is revealed. That’s not hard to do. You can block out your head with a quarter if you hold it close enough to the camera.

And in this case you have something much better than a quarter. You have a large envelope and the large prediction you pull from it.

Here is an overhead look of how, generally, I see the choreography working.

So, you see, the natural walking path you’re going to take is going to take you out of the field of vision as you walk to the prediction and back to the desk with it. (It’s the “natural” walking path because your chair is directly behind you, so it makes sense you would veer around it rather than just trampling over it like a moron.) It’s as you return with the prediction, in the brief moment you’re fully off screen, that you’ll switch with the other person (with them either taking the prediction or already having a matching envelope in their hands ready to go).

From the point that the other person enters the camera’s field of vision, they will be holding out the envelope so it blocks their face. This isn’t unnatural. It makes sense that “you’ would be putting that front and center.

Ideally the other person would be in matching clothes, or at least something similar. If their body is vastly different than yours, they may need to block more of the image than just their head, but that pretty much goes without saying. They will hold out the envelope to the camera, remove the image of their face, then slide that image off to the side to reveal that it’s them holding the image now.

Obviously you’ll need to force the person at the beginning of the trick, but it really doesn’t matter how you go about doing that. You can use DFB, or a svengali pad, or names written on cards that you riffle force to, or whatever. No one is going to care about that part of the trick by the time it’s over.

You could, of course, do the trick for anyone over video chat. It doesn’t need to be for someone in your house. It doesn’t even need to be someone the person watching even knows. You could force one photo from a group of photos, then reveal your prediction matches, then reveal you’ve changed into that person. That would work too. However, the reason I wrote it up the way I did is because, as a trick, I think it’s pretty good. But as a way to surprise someone with the appearance of a loved one they didn’t know was in town, it becomes a capital-M, Magical moment.